Cognitive Biases and Being a Fallible Human

Human Nature is subject to many flaws. In particular, cognitive biases are psychological tendencies that cause the human brain to draw incorrect conclusions. Wikipedia describes a Cognitive Bias:

A cognitive bias describes a replicable pattern in perceptual distortion, inaccurate judgment, illogical interpretation, or what is broadly called irrationality. They are the result of distortions in the human mind that always lead to the same pattern of poor judgment, often triggered by a particular situation. Identifying “poor judgment,” or more precisely, a “deviation in judgment,” requires a standard for comparison, i.e. “good judgment”. In scientific investigations of cognitive bias, the source of “good judgment” is that of people outside the situation hypothesized to cause the poor judgment, or, if possible, a set of independently verifiable facts. The existence of most of the particular cognitive biases listed below has been verified empirically in psychology experiments.

I’m often involved in decisions, either on my own or as part of the team or providing information to someone else. When researching a product or a technology, I try to be conscious of how I perceive problems, how I react to the data I have available or whether I have the right data. I consider whether my current frame of mind is positive or negative, am I tired. Did some person from a particular company make me angry, or excite me ? Does this affect my perception of a vendor or their product ?

By being aware of the fact that human nature is consistently flawed, I can try to “engineer” my thinking and affect the people around me. Being aware of these biases helps me to consider why someone might act a certain way, or take a view that I don’t understand. As an example, I may have been researching a project for a customer for about 100 hours. Over that time, I’ll make a number of decisions, firm up a view and prepare a report that details my solution. By this time, I’m pretty sure that I know

While there are many biases here is a shorter (and incomplete) list decision making biases that I try to account for:

Social Biases (19 in total)

Social Bias

Description

Self-fulfilling prophecy

The tendency to engage in behaviors that elicit results which will (consciously or not) confirm existing attitudes.

Status Quo Bias

The tendency to defend and bolster the status quo. Existing social, economic, and political arrangements tend to be preferred, and alternatives disparaged sometimes even at the expense of individual and collective self-interest.

Herd instinct

Common tendency to adopt the opinions and follow the behaviors of the majority to feel safer and to avoid conflict.

Projection bias

The tendency to unconsciously assume that others share the same or similar thoughts, beliefs, values, or positions.

Illusion of asymmetric insight

People perceive their knowledge of their peers to surpass their peers’ knowledge of them.

Memory Biases (eight in total)

Memory Biases

Description

Hindsight bias

Filtering memory of past events through present knowledge, so that those events look more predictable than they actually were; also known as the ‘I-knew-it-all-along effect’.

Suggestibility

A form of misattribution where ideas suggested by a questioner are mistaken for memory.